This invention relates to networking, and more particularly to monitoring and analysis of network traffic and determination of whether transactions data are to be stored based on pattern matching.
In complex and large computer networking environment, large amounts of data will be passed across the network. The data will represent a variety of different applications and users and protocols, and from the perspective of network analysis, the amount of data can be overwhelming. From a network monitoring perspective, the amount of data quickly becomes too large and ways to efficiently process the information become important. Data storage of monitored data can quickly become an issue. As an example, in monitoring traffic resulting from a user accessing web sites, it is typical for many image type data to be transferred. From the perspective of the network monitoring for troubleshooting or performance analysis, the image data would likely not be desired to be stored. Heretofore, there was no ability to easily determine that the data should or should not be stored at the time of data collection by the monitoring device.